Solaniwa Onsen

Solaniwa Onsen is a hot spring theme park in the Osaka Bay Tower complex at Bentencho, Osaka. Its operator describes the interior as styled on the Muromachi and Edo periods.

The baths

The water is a simple hot spring, hypotonic and weakly alkaline, drawn from 1,000 meters underground and known as Bihada no Yu (美肌の湯), the water for beautiful skin. The men's and women's bath floors each have nine kinds of bath. They include an open-air bath fed straight from the source without recirculation, an infinity bath looking out over the garden, a carbonated bath and a bath whose scent changes through the year. A Finnish sauna and akasuri body scrubs are also on the bath floor.

Ten private open-air baths, each with its own small courtyard garden and water from the source, are rented by the room: two large Japanese-style rooms with tatami, seven smaller rooms and one room with a tent sauna.

The ganbanyoku, a bedrock sauna area with its own fee, has seven rooms kept at different temperatures, from a cooling room at about 10 degrees to a large room at about 70 degrees with an automatic loyly every half hour. Men and women can use it together.

The rooftop garden

The Japanese garden on the roof covers about 1,000 tsubo, roughly 3,300 square meters, and is walked in the yukata worn as house wear. A long foot bath runs along one side. Beyond the central pond are a waterfall, a tunnel of torii gates and, at the highest point, a small shrine with a statue of Benten carved by a Buddhist sculptor.

Other facilities

Restaurants and tea houses sit on the lower floors, and an all-weather terrace in the garden is booked for meals. The relaxation salon Keirakuin has about 30 treatment beds. Next door, SOLANIWA Beauty and Wellness groups a 24-hour gym, eyelash and nail salons, teeth whitening and cosmetics shops; it is reached from the onsen in yukata and needs no onsen ticket.

Tattoos are allowed only when fully covered with the cover stickers sold at the venue, a policy the operator runs as a trial.